Member

Let me add a human context. I spoke recently to a brave young woman whose world was turned upside-down when police uncovered her father’s posts on a well-known chat site describing and inviting others to describe what he claimed he had done to his daughter since she was six. The police intervened and arrested him, protecting the family, but on further investigation they found no physical abuse and did not charge him for fantasising and glamorising imagined abuse. This is unquestionably abusive behaviour. The law in this area is unclear and we need unambiguous law that makes it easier for the police and the CPS to charge and, ultimately, for prosecutions to happen. By closing this loophole, we could give the police more preventive powers and, importantly, place obligations on platforms and chat sites to stop this content and dialogue at source. Again, it was a very easy to access chat site encouraging this.